re: #7 Erik The Red

I thought the idea of the tea parties was a good one. Unfortunately they seem to have been hijacked by the kooky right.

Where are all the sane Conservatives?

I don’t think its so much that they have been hijacked. If you are going to have a protest of any kind of size, you are going to need a simple message that appeals to as many people as possible. But the people you get will include excitable types that already tend towards being around the bend, and they are going to spout their pet theories or causes that the originator(s) probably doesn’t agree with at all.

For example, “Obama & Congress spending are too much money on irresponsible projects with borrowed money” is probably agreed to by 30-40% of the population at this point. Among that number will be many who agree with each other on nearly nothing else, and plenty of them who don’t bother keeping focused—not to mention mobies or other perpetually aggrieved sorts who show up to any protest.

This is probably unavoidable given the humanity we have, and some kooks can’t discredit the movement, unless you expect someone to use force to keep everyone on message or plan on discrediting every protest ever.

The latter of which might actually be what is best, but it does limit your representation to the either the ballot box, which is slow and a bit suspect at times, or persuasion via letters, op eds, blogs, etc. which seems unlikely to work in this situation as most of congress is committed to the idea of transforming the state into a master, or at least parent, relationship with regard to the citizenry via untenable deficit spending (and not the comparatively mild deficits of Bush, either. Scale matters!).